Pommy pasta pioneers

After a hard day's jousting, what a medieval English knight looked forward to was ... a plate of lasagna.

Researchers have found a British recipe for lasagna dating from the 14th Century - long before Italian chefs came up with the delicious concoction of layers of pasta topped with cheese.

"This is the first recorded recipe for a lasagna-based dish," David Crompton, one of the British researchers, said today. "The Italian dish has tomatoes, which were only discovered two centuries later in the New World."

Professor Crompton doesn't claim that the English actually invented lasagna, and other food historians have suggested the dish has a very ancient history.

Professor Crompton and other organisers of a medieval festival to be held at Berkeley Castle in southern England later this month found the recipe at the British Museum in "The Forme of Cury", commissioned by King Richard II in 1390 and regarded as one of the world's oldest recipe books.

"We prepared the medieval lasagna yesterday at the castle and it was delicious, although strangely sweet and spicy," Professor Crompton said. Among its ingredients are cinnamon and saffron, not usually found in the Italian version.

To create loseyns (pronounced lasan), "The Forme of Cury" advises the cook to make a paste from flour of "paynedemayn," a substance that hasn't been identified, roll it thin and cook it with grated cheese and sweet powder.

But the Italians are having none of it. "Whatever this old dish was called, it was not lasagna as we make it," The Daily Telegraph quoted an Italian Embassy spokesman as saying.

The recipe in full:

"Take good broth and do in an erthen pot. Take flour of paynedemayn and make erof past with water and make erof thynne foyles as paper with a roller; drye it harde and see it in broth."

Next, "take chese ruayn grated and lay it in dishes with powder douce and lay eron loseyns isode as hoole as you myght and above powdour and chese; and so twyse or thryse & serue it forth."

Berkeley Castle's festival, featuring medieval jousting and a siege reenactment, is on July 26 and 27.